It’s a little longwinded and meandering, but it’s a good piece and a good message. This is why things like Linux and opensource are so important. On the surface it looks like a bunch of nerds making our computers slightly more of a hassle to use and slightly less compatible with everything else, but maintaining full control of what our systems do, what other system’s they talk to, and maintaining a chain of accountability that goes all the way to the hardware is so important. Sadly it’s important in ways that the average person doesn’t care much about, or rather they won’t care about them until it’s too late. Until every computer for sale everywhere is just a surveillance device shaped like a laptop that plays youtube and opens facebook while logging and sending off every click and keystroke.

Now I’m all fired up. I’m going to go install Linux on an old thinkpad.

Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policy on them, to examine and terminate the processes that run on them, to maintain them as honest servants to our will, and not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks.

This is the crux of the entire article and the entire debate. If we don’t control our devices, then the devices will be used to control us.

We have a chance, a real chance, and if we support open and free systems, and the organizations that fight for them – EFF, Bits of Freedom, EDRI, ORG, CC, Netzpolitik, La Quadrature du Net, and all the others, who are thankfully, too numerous to name here – we may yet win the battle, and secure the ammunition we’ll need for the war. Cory Doctorow

The teaser text could do with simpler and more concise sentences. So many commas and thought block within one sentence.

Same thing with right to repair directly influencing our freedom If you cant repair it yourself, you are victim of whoever can fix it when it breaks.

Good post. Butlerian Jihad when?